


Listening for a fistful of silence

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [32]
Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:08:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26104708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: Some of Vinnie's past resurfaces.
Series: The Roadhouse Blues [32]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1069713





	Listening for a fistful of silence

Sonny gave his watch an impatient glance. Not even a full minute had passed since the last time he'd looked at it, but Vinnie was still late and it was still annoying, and the most annoying part was, when Vinnie showed up, Sonny couldn't even complain about his lateness without Vinnie laughing at him, because to him, late meant there were places you had to be or you'd miss something, or you'd get in trouble, and there wasn't any place either of them had to be.

But Sonny liked his schedule. And anyway, it was no fun playing hooky if you weren't playing hooky from anything.

So he finished his coffee, paid the bill, and went off to find Vinnie.

"Find" wasn't really the right word, since Sonny knew where Vinnie was, approximately. He was in one of those crummy used book stores he liked to hang out in.

Vinnie had gotten hooked on phonics when they were driving around the country, always buying his books used. When Sonny pointed out that there were things like Borders and Waldens, where the books were nice and clean, Vinnie told him that a lot of the little places they stopped in didn't have new book stores, but they usually had, if not a used book store, a Goodwill or some other place that had books. When Sonny countered that there were drug stores and grocery stores that had paperbacks, Vinnie sighed and said, "I like used book stores because there's no telling what I might find, and they're not in any order." That actually made some sense to Sonny; Vinnie didn't just want to have a book to read, he liked to hunt for a book to read. Except for the way they smelled, Sonny didn't care, and he'd kind of gotten used to that.

Sonny didn't like reading books. If he wanted stories, he'd go to the movies or watch TV. Words on a page weren't anywhere near as good as real people on a big screen. And as far as facts went, by the time they got them into a book, they weren't new anymore, so why bother? So he stuck with newspapers and news magazines. But then, Sonny was trying to find things out, and Vinnie was trying to escape from the bad stuff in his head.

There were a lot of used book stores in San Francisco, and Vinnie probably knew where all of them were. Sonny knew there was one right around the corner from the restaurant, and he was willing to bet he'd find Vinnie there.

Too bad there was nobody to bet with. Vinnie had his nose buried in a copy of some Agatha Christie book. He didn't take it out when Sonny came up and nudged him, but he did smile.

"You stood me up," Sonny said.

Vinnie glanced at his wrist, but he wasn't wearing his watch. But he still said, "I lost track of the time. Sorry."

"What's the name of this one?" Sonny asked. He didn't care, but he always asked.

" _A Murder Is Announced._ " He closed the book and put it back on the shelf. "I think I've already read it." That was what happened when you read too many books, pretty soon you couldn't keep track of them. As though in response to Sonny’s thought, he added, “A lot of them have different titles.”

“Aren’t they all supposed to have different titles?” Sonny asked.

Vinnie gave him an annoyed look, but he laughed. “I mean, a bunch of Agatha Christie’s books have more than one title; the title they used in England and the title they used over here.”

“Why?”

“How do I know? I just know I bought some of the same books again by mistake and this might be one of them.”

Sonny rolled his eyes and walked away. There was no reason for him to stay; Vinnie had plenty of money to buy whatever strays he ran across, and his own lunch, and whatever else he felt like buying, short of an airplane. And Sonny was hungry. But he'd gotten into the habit of browsing around while Vinnie looked for his latest fix, so he wandered around, waiting for Vinnie, wondering how anyone found anything in this place. It was jam-packed with books, in no kind of order Sonny could see. Most of them were paperbacks, on wooden shelves that went from the floor to . . . about a foot and a half above the top of Vinnie's head. That was the free-standing shelves. The ones against the wall went all the way to the ceiling, but there were those rolling ladders so people who weren't giants could browse them. Vinnie had probably done that.

Sonny's browsing wasn't like Vinnie's. When Vinnie browsed, he did it slowly, picking out books and reading the back covers before either returning them to their places or putting them in a pile to buy. Sonny's browsing was really just pacing up and down the aisles, occasionally stopping to look at a book because unless there were other customers, there was nothing else to look at.

And that was what he was doing when he found the book.

Sonny couldn't have explained what made him pick it out; it was just one of those "true" crime books that shared space with the two-inch thick horror and romance novels on the racks in airport gift shops. The title, printed in gaudy red letters both on the spine and the cover, read, _Mel & Susan: Psychotic Critical Mass._ And on the cover, underneath a picture Sonny assumed was of Mel and Susan Profitt, _Was it a death pact gone wrong? Was Susan Profitt supposed to follow her brother into his grave the way she'd followed him her whole life?_

Sonny looked at the picture. She was a fucking beautiful woman, no question about that. He opened the book, skipped to the back where the list of people who were mentioned in the book was supposed to be. There was a word for that list, but Sonny couldn't remember what it was, and it didn't matter anyway because there wasn't one.

He flipped to the pictures in the middle of the book. They were all black and white, the Profitts' life from childhood up to what had to be a semi-recent picture of Susan that looked like it had been taken in a hospital. The caption read, _She killed her brother and lost herself._

Sonny flipped back to the front of the book, to see when it was written. Nineteen ninety-two Was Vinnie in this book?

Sonny's first impulse was to steal the book. He'd been pretty good at hooking stuff when he was a kid. Never books, but would books be harder? It wasn't as though anybody would miss one from the millions that were crammed into the tiny store.

His second thought was how stupid that was. Wouldn't it be something if what sank them was him getting caught with a stolen twenty-five cent paperback in his pocket?

So he'd buy it, but not right now. He'd never once bought anything on these excursions, and even if Vinnie was doing his zombie impression, he'd notice this. And Vinnie was pretty up today. So Sonny put the book back on the shelf, but a higher one than he'd found it on, and slipping it behind some other books. He put a copy of something called _The Deeds of the Disturber_ in its place. He'd roust Vinnie out of here and come back later and buy the book.

Vinnie had a big stack of books cradled in his right arm. "You're not hungry?" Sonny asked him.

"Huh?"

"You know, you really deserve that rep you've got for eloquence. Are you hungry?"

Vinnie laughed. "Yeah, kind'a."

"So pay for those things and I'll buy you lunch."

Vinnie was in a cooperative mood for once, and he paid for his books and left with Sonny without arguing. Of course then he wanted to linger over his lunch when all Sonny wanted to do was get back to the bookstore, but Sonny hid his impatience and bought Vinnie a second dessert while he drank another cup of coffee. "What're you reading now?"

For some reason, Vinnie laughed at the question. "Found a new mystery writer. Well, an old mystery writer, but I've never read any of her books." Vinnie pulled a book out of the bag. "You want one?"

Now Sonny laughed, read the book's cover. "Never heard of her. She any relation to Walt Disney?"

"How would I know?"

"You want more to eat?" Sonny offered. Vinnie was getting a gut, and Sonny knew it bothered him, but it didn't bother Sonny. He liked the way Vinnie looked, big and lived in. And anything was better than the way he'd been when Sonny's first stolen him, like he'd just been liberated from a concentration camp.

Vinnie shook his head. "You want to go back to work, and I'm going to look around a couple more bookstores."

Sonny took out his wallet to pay the bill. "You need money for cab fare?"

Again Vinnie shook his head. "I'm good. Anyhow, I'm going to walk home."

Sonny had known he was going to say that. "I don't know how you stand these hills."

"Sonny, you grew up in the Bronx, and from what I remember from college, they weren't exactly the Flatlands. There were a lot of times I wasn't sure I was gonna make it back to the subway stop when class was over."

Sonny couldn't really argue the point. "We were younger then."

"Speak for yourself," Vinnie said. He was in a very good mood. Sonny wished he could blow off this book buying deal and just spend the afternoon with him.

Vinnie touched him before they parted, put his hand on Sonny's neck for just a second, still smiling. "What do you want for dinner tonight?"

"Don't bother, I'll get take-out from that Chinese place you're so crazy about."

"You're in an awful good mood," Vinnie said with some surprise, again touching Sonny's neck. Sonny laughed because it was just what he'd been thinking about Vinnie.

The book was where he'd left it. And just to be on the safe side, Sonny looked around the whole bookstore for other copies. There weren't any. Sonny wondered if he should go to the other bookstores Vinnie went to, to see if they had copies of this crummy book. The problem was—besides he might run into Vinnie—people sold books in these places all the time, and how could Sonny possibly know when somebody would walk in with another copy that Vinnie might run across?

Sonny took a deep breath of the booky-smelling air and went up to the counter to pay for his book.

Sonny planned to take the book back to his office and read the whole thing, front cover to back, only he wasn't a fast reader and he wasn't interested in Susan or Mel Profitt. He skimmed the page thanking a bunch of people he'd never heard of, and the page explaining why the author had written the book in the first place—which Sonny knew was a lie, since the word _money_ was never mentioned.

He got through the first chapter, where he learned that Mel and Susan had been found in a dumpster in Louisiana in nineteen fifty-nine. Their parents were nowhere to be found, nor were any records of their births. Two-or-so year old Mel was able to provide the police with their first names, and in honor of the police officer who brought them in, the state foundling home gave them the last name of Roberts.

It was at that point that Sonny's microscopic interest ran out and he skipped to the back and started going forward.

As of the year of the book's publication, Susan Profitt was alive and unwell and living in Shady Groves Mental Facility in upstate New York. It looked like a nice place, from the pictures. Susan had been a patient there for the last seven years, and according to several orderlies, she hadn't been heard to speak a word in the last six and a half. The official diagnosis was a psychotic break, which apparently wasn't really an official diagnosis at all, it just meant the doctors had no idea what was wrong with her. One nurse told the author that she had been _separating from reality since before her arrival. At first she talked about her dead brother as though he were alive, and about a baby she wasn't pregnant with. Then she began having conversations with people who weren't there, and finally she stopped speaking at all._ Shady Groves was nice place with a talky staff.

Sessions with the psychiatrists proved futile, since Susan seemed to have no idea they were even there. Electroshock had had no effect, and of the different drugs they tried, only one did anything: it made her start screaming.

Since one of the main reasons for giving crazy people drugs was to keep them from screaming, they discontinued that one immediately. Nobody in the book said so, but Sonny had the idea that drug was the one that worked. She'd been living in fantasy land since before she'd been locked up. What the hell kind of reaction were they expecting if they managed to bring her back to a reality of no brother, no baby, no money, no freedom, no Vinnie? Who **wouldn't** start screaming?

Sonny skipped back to the pictures. The last one was one of Susan, taken on the grounds of the hospital. Her big eyes were empty, but her face was still very beautiful, if you liked a woman who looked like a living doll. The earlier pictures showed a far more animated woman.

Before he went back to reading, Sonny examined the pictures closely, the ones that had been—or might have been—taken when Vinnie was there. They were all newspaper photos, and yes, there was one where the top of Vinnie's head could be seen behind Susan's head. Sonny was sure it was Vinnie's head. There were none showing his face. That was a good thing. They might have his name, but they didn't have his face. He looked at all the other pictures and found that the author hadn't included any pictures of anybody but Mel and Susan, not even the parents that adopted them, not Roger Lococco, not Vinnie, nobody. Good deal. Who would want their picture in this book?

Sonny went back to the front of the book, moving quickly past pages of irrelevancy until he came to where Vinnie got hired.

_In early 1988 in Stockton, California, Lococco met Vincent Terranova, former henchman of Sonny Steelgrave. Steelgrave, a New Jersey mobster, had committed suicide the year before, and Terranova was at loose ends.  
…  
Terranova must have had considerable charm; he and Lococco hit it off immediately, and Lococco took him back to the Hotei, where Susan also took an immediate shine to him.  
…  
Susan had dallied with the hired help whenever it took her fancy, but whatever those liaisons might have meant to her, they couldn't compare to what she shared with Mel. Either she would end the relationship, or Mel would fire the man, or drop him from their circle of hangers-on, and things would go back to what passed for normal in their world.  
…  
Terranova's arrival changed everything. Susan's crush on Terranova blossomed into something stronger, something Mel found threatening. Probably it was that Terranova represented something Susan Profitt had never had: a real home, something Mel could never provide.  
…  
Terranova was insubordinate to Mel, something that had never been permitted by the help. His relationship with Susan was more romantic than sexual. When Terranova was later shot during an assassination attempt by an unknown assailant, Susan was as distraught as if Mel himself had been the one shot.  
…  
It was the beginning of the end._

Sonny finished the section, then went back and re-read the first two sentences where he was mentioned. It gave Sonny the creeps that some bookworm he'd never even heard of had been writing about him without him knowing about it. Sonny really didn't like this guy at all.

There was more, about Susan being abducted by a drug lord the Profitts had been doing business with, and how Vinnie and this Roger Lococco had rescued her. About Mel's spiral down and how Susan was spending less time with him, more time with Terranova. Speculations about Lococco's undercover CIA operation accelerating that spiral, which culminated Susan's overdosing Mel.

Then, inexplicably, Susan became convinced that Mel was really alive, and that she was pregnant with Terranova's baby. This turned out not to be true. Susan was experiencing her own spiral, and Terranova had her taken to Shady Grove.

The New York City police were outraged by this, but it soon became clear to everyone that Susan was completely unfit to tie her shoes, let alone stand trial. Lococco and Terranova disappeared entirely, with Lococcco reappearing before a Congressional hearing, then being blown up on a boat, along with what was estimated as billions of the Profitts's money.

But there was still plenty for the government to seize, so not too many questions were asked, probably because they were afraid to find out the CIA itself had had Lococco taken out. Strangely, no one seemed interested in who was paying for Susan's care. Sonny figured that was because Vinnie had scooped up some money himself and was using it to fund her hospitalization. Since he **was** the government who was going to ask questions? He must have set up a trust for her. And the author of the book was only interested in Vinnie as far as his life intersected the Profitts', and by the time he got around to writing his book, Vinnie wasn't around to try to interview. He was as dead as Sonny was. "Just as well for you, pal. Vinnie's got a left that'd have a weasel like you seeing stars for a week. And that assassination attempt, that was Aldo trying to kill Vinnie. For an investigative journalist—" Sonny checked the book's cover, found the author's name, "—you really don't know shit, do you, Wurman?"

Sonny locked the book in his desk drawer and left his office. He'd read the rest of it later; there were things hiding in this piece of trash, too many references to things he didn't get, like references to a "dangerous lovers' triangle," that made his skin crawl. What the hell had Vinnie been through with those Profitts?

A part of him didn't really want to know what else was in that book, and it was obvious he couldn't necessarily believe any of it anyway. If he really wanted to know what had happened, he'd have to get Vinnie to tell him, and maybe he didn't want to do that, either.

Whatever Sonny was going to do, he wasn't going to do it today. He could leave it for tomorrow, when maybe Vinnie wouldn't be in such a good mood. It was late afternoon already, but still earlier than his usual quitting time. He was hoping to find Vinnie still book shopping, and he drove to several of the stores he knew Vinnie frequented, but no dice.

So he picked up the Chinese food and drove home, detouring past the park in case Vinnie was there. This time he was in luck; Vinnie was sitting on a picnic table, reading one of his new acquisitions. Sonny parked the car, went to the package store down the street, and bought some cold beer.

"Get your butt off the table," Sonny said by way of greeting. Vinnie grinned, but didn't move until he'd finished the page he was reading, dog-earred it, and closed the book. The title of this one was _Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate._ Man, that was an old book, back when computers ran on those punch cards.

"You just come to hassle me about my table manners?" Vinnie asked. Again he reached out and touched Sonny, the back of his fingers to the side of Sonny's neck.

"No, I brought dinner." Sonny put the bags of food on the table, and took the beers out of their bag.

"Chopsticks?" Vinnie asked.

"Idiot. You can't use chopsticks."

Vinnie shrugged. "Neither can you. Forks, then?"

"No, we're gonna eat with our hands like animals." Sonny rummaged in the bags until he found a couple of plastic forks. "Here."

"Animals don't have hands," Vinnie objected. "Well, raccoons do, kind of. And squirrels."

Sonny dope-slapped him.

"Have a good day?" Vinnie asked. "Make a lot of money? Do you own the world yet?"

"Not all of it," Sonny said. "Enough to pay for your reading habit."

"And Chinese food, and beer. We're in the money," he said, and sang, "We've got a lot of what it takes to get along."

"How long have you been sitting here?" Sonny asked.

"I dunno. What time is it?" Still no watch on his wrist.

Sonny looked at his watch. "Four-thirty."

"Hey, you're off early. Did you sneak out? Are you going to get in trouble with your boss?"

Sonny rolled his eyes, and he wasn't going to say anything, but he couldn't help himself. "Mr. Patrice does not look kindly on employees who shirk their duties," he said, mimicking Sid's prissy, unfailingly disapproving tone. It was an old game, one they had played whenever Sid was being particularly obnoxious. Vinnie had usually started it to keep Sonny from punching the crap out of Sid.

When Vinnie finally stopped laughing, he said, "Mr. Patrice wants his employees on duty twenty-three and a half hours a day."

"Only twenty-three and a half?" Sonny asked with interest. "What's the half-hour off for?"

"Mr. Patrice is a very generous employer," Vinnie said, still in that prissy Sid-voice. "He allows his employees one half hour a day for a potty break." And they both cracked up.

"How long have you been sitting here?"

Vinnie laughed ruefully. "I don't know what time I got here. I'm about finished with the first book." It wasn't a very thick book, but Vinnie wasn't exactly a speed-reader himself, so he'd probably been there most of the afternoon.

Sonny sat down and parceled out the food while Vinnie opened the beers with his Swiss Army knife. Vinnie told him about the book he was reading, but otherwise they didn't talk much. Sonny liked how comfortably they could just sit and eat and not talk. He didn't ask Vinnie any questions, not about why he was sitting in the park or about the Profitts. He knew why Vinnie sat in the park so much: it was something he'd picked up from being locked up, a kind of claustrophobia. And he didn't want to know anything more about the Profitts, nothing Vinnie didn't tell him on his own. In the morning he'd tear the pages out of the book and put the whole thing through his shredder.

**Author's Note:**

> [This story was inspired by someone who I thought commented on one of the other stories on LJ, but I can't find the comment (and I have precious little memory) so I can't give proper credit. If you're out there reading this, remind me who you are so I can thank you publicly!
> 
> (I'm so totally not to be trusted when I'm in the throes of writing a fun story.)]


End file.
